A collaboration work with Bassam El Baroni, Constantinos Miltiadis and Gerriet K. Sharma.
15:34, Single channel HD Video + 2 channel stereo audio
(Installation version incorporates 8 channel spatial audio)
Project Cybersyn was an experiment in instituting a socialist networked economy embraced by the short-lived Salvador Allende government of Chile (1970 – 1973) and developed together with the British cybernetician Stafford Beer. For the past decade, Project Cybersyn has been a recurrent reference – a best practice from the past – in discussions around the repurposing of hegemonic technological infrastructures and their redirection towards more equitable economic and social practices. The iconic image of Project Cybersyn’s control room – with its sci-fi appearance – represents a technical and aesthetic object that alludes to negotiation, democratic decision making, and stability. The allure of this image is the starting point for the video which proposes that desires for post-scarcity and postcapitalist economics must grapple with the shifts in the political, economic, and technological conditions of possibility that have transpired since Project Cybersyn. To this end the control room image itself becomes a platform for alien mutations, philosophical speculations, and social commitments. What would it take to reimagine the artefactual Cybersyn for our hyper-financialized day and age? For this work, curator and researcher Bassam El Baroni and transdisciplinary architect Constantinos Miltiadis collaborated with multidisciplinary artist and animator Georgios Cherouvim, and composer and sound artist Gerriet K. Sharma to bring this question to life.
Credits:
Concept, Research and Screenplay: Bassam El Baroni and Constantinos Miltiadis
Animation Director: Georgios Cherouvim
Music and Sound Spatialisation: Gerriet K. Sharma
Modelling: Katerina Lakovaki
Illustration: Ino Zavvou and Andreas Kelemen
Voice actors: Bassam El Baroni, Andreas Kelemen, Constantinos Miltiadis, and Edel O’Reilly
Render Support: Dimitris Liatsos
Special thanks: Agelos Christopoulos, Omer Shapira, Liz Ran Yang.
The screenplay is composed of original writing, inspirations, and reconfigured fragments from essays and historical research by a host of philosophers, theorists, and historians: David Chandler, Bob Hughes, Anna Longo, Suhail Malik, Eden Medina, Andrew Pickering, Matthew Poole, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.
Exhibitions
Edith-Russ-Haus – Infrahauntologies curated by Bassam El Baroni
08 July 2021 – 03 October 2021
(Oldenburg, Germany)
Galerie La Box – Infrahauntologies curated by Bassam El Baroni
21 October 2021 – 20 November 2021
(Bourges, France)
Screenings
ISEA Conference 2022
(Barcelona, Spain)
Cybersyn Opsroom 3D model
The model and the textures of the Opsroom is provided under the Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The asset was developed over information and photographs found in archival research material, most notably in:
“Cybersyn: Synergia Cybernetica” by or-am (Enrique Rivera Gallardo and Catalina Ossa Holmgren – archived website), and
“Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” by Eden Medina (2011).
Therefore, and because of the relatively scarce documentation materials, the present model is not an accurate reconstruction but a close approximation of the 1973 Cybersyn Operations Room.
